


Blackburn, Lancashire

by aces



Category: House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-14
Updated: 2010-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-07 06:33:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/62390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aces/pseuds/aces
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wilson has a hole.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blackburn, Lancashire

**Author's Note:**

> I think I need to apologize for semi-obscure (but not really) Beatles references. This includes the title. I have no self-resistance when it comes to semi-obscure (but not really) references when it comes to titles.

Wilson has a hole. Well, half a hole anyway. He gives the rest to anyone who will take it.

*

"Wilson," says everyone, in a way that is secretly admiring, "is a bastard. But at least he's an honest bastard."

Somehow for most people this makes him slightly more endearing than House.

*

Wilson has a hole. It may be a spiritual one, it may be a metaphorical one, it may be a psychological or emotional one, it may even simply be one in his blazer pocket or on his trousers. But Wilson has a hole and unfortunately has no needle and thread to close it.

Neither, apparently, does anyone else.

*

The first time James cheated on his first wife, he didn't feel anything. It was like someone had injected him with a local anesthetic, right over the emotional centers of his brain, and he went through the next few days blissfully, blissfully numb.

(It was around the fifth time that he broke down and went home to tell his wife.)

Since then, the guilt creeps in, seeps through him and occasionally drives him to distraction. But not even the guilt fills the hole, so he finds it comparatively easy to continue with his life in the usual way.

*

Wilson has a hole, and temporary fixes. (They work, so long as the other person smiles at him, laughs with him, puts a spring in his step.) The longest a fix has ever lasted has been two months, one week, four days, and twelve minutes. And that was his third wife.

Wilson has a hole, and temporary fixes. He never lets himself think that maybe he should take up Vicodin too.

*

James would in fact give half his hole to House if he could, but House instead has shoved half a hole on top of his own hole, and this would probably piss James off if he wasn't just so _used_ to being stuck with the body in the trunk and the nice policeman reaching for his sidearm.

*

Nobody ever asks Wilson about his hole. Cameron did, once, in a fit of anger because he refused to apologize for House's usual asinine behavior, and they were both so shocked by her question that she fled without waiting for an answer and James went to a bar to get really, really drunk. The next day her face flushed when she ran into him in House's office, and he had a bastard of a headache, but that was the end of the matter.

James doesn't believe in regrets (if he did, he might have stopped remarrying), but sometimes he wonders what he would have said if Cameron had waited for an answer.

*

Wilson hates watching his patients die. He hates the way their bodies betray them by degrees, the way the medications so often only seem to pile on, speed up, the wasting away. Sometimes they give up, before he does, and he does not have a family member's right to scream and cry and force the patient to live.

He usually likes it when House consults him because House always seems to keep his patients alive, and he never lets ethics or professionalism get in the way of screaming—and crying?—and forcing the patient to live.

*

Wilson has a hole—half a hole anyway—and nobody has been able to fill it. Sometimes, late at night when he's scrunched uncomfortably on his office couch, he worries he's actually made of holes, widening and spreading, and he really will someday become negative space.

It's usually when he starts thinking things like that he tells himself to stop being an ass, rolls over on the uncomfortable couch, and goes to sleep.

*

If Wilson is honest with himself—and James often tries to be honest with himself, though he sometimes has the sneaking suspicion he fails at it miserably—he admits he has no right to this hole, no need for this hole, and it just acts as an excuse. And yet, no matter how many temporary fixes he runs through, no matter how much the guilt seeps in, no matter how many nights he stays awake self-analyzing, the hole remains.

Wilson has a hole. Well, half a hole anyway. The rest he'll give to anyone who will take it, and so many people will, but they just won't _keep_ it.

*

"C'mon," says House, cracking Wilson painfully on the knees with his cane. "Let's go fill that hole of yours."


End file.
